In case you are wondering, "D" is my husband -- Dave Liu! As you've probably noticed, I don't update this blog often but I may post more as I've linked this to my Google+ account.

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Pleonasms and Oxymora

I took a course on English writing as a requirement for my Industrial Engineering undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto (the other U of T). The only thing I remember from that class is that I'm supposed to avoid using redundant words, e.g., "dead corpse" and "end result". I just learned today that these redundancies are called pleonasms.

The opposite of a pleonasm, is an oxymoron (the plural of which is "oxymora", not "oxymorons"). Here's a list of some quotes containing oxymora. I'll provide one below that is especially meaningful to me lately because I just watched the movie "Matrix Reloaded":